Preaching Lessons: Brian McLaren Part II

"Light Fires, Issue Permission Slips, Invite others into Interpretive Community"

McLaren's lecture focused on what he understood the charge for preacher to be right now. Here's my outline:

Light Fires:

• Light a fire of hope, concern and courage wherever you go.
• Light your own fire first--"You can't be a purveyor of abundant life if you are so much of a workaholic that you can't enjoy it yourself."
• Light fires in others around you.

Issue Permission Slips:

• Give people permission to dance, to be happy, to move, to do something different. McLaren worked with the metaphorical and literal implications of dance for quite a while. Suffice it to say, dancing is good.
• Give permission to dance to a new tune.
• Give permission to dance with new partners (especially ecumenical partners, for McLaren).
• Give permission to innovate.

I never quite got the invite part of things. I think this is when he was talking about ecumenism. But yeah. Get others on board, I guess?

The implications for preaching and worship were mostly common-sense--dry dusty liturgy that nobody is passionate about is not worth keeping around. Write something new. Do something new. Perform something new. Dance something new. But mostly, do it with passion and excitement.

In terms of preaching formation, I really didn't get much out of what he was saying here. He seemed to think that he was saying something quite novel, especially when he discussed moving away from preaching a theology of salvation to a theology of creation, and maybe in the larger context, he is. But to me, most of what he was saying was pretty obvious. (I wanted to ask how theologies of salvation and creation differed in the first place, but thought better of it.)

McLaren was explicit in his wanting to move the church to a new place in its life, and he sees this happening through the metaphor of dance. Which is great. But at the same time, it is a little awkward to begin to try to apply his ideas to a congregational setting, especially when his ideas are being incubated outside of one. Dr. Grundy and I talked about this further--about how emergent church folks are able to offer valid critique of the church from the outside, but it fails to be able to offer much realistic advice or guidance for those working on the inside. And McLaren's advice to move beyond denominations seems to me to be a good model on a local level--why wouldn't you be working with your other brothers and sisters in faith int he local community--but he was proposing it on a much larger scale, which rang very strange to my ears.